Coyne: Trudeau caught Mulcair with his pants down

It wasn't a "turning point" or a "defining moment" (these exist mostly in journalists' imaginations), but if there was an instant when Justin Trudeau - I don't want to say won this, because there are still several days to go, the polls could be wrong etc., etc. - but if there was a moment when he avoided completely blowing himself up before he'd begun, it came during the first televised debate, in the campaign's first week.

acoyne

Updated: October 15, 2015

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau makes a point during the first leaders debate Thursday, August 6, 2015 in Toronto.Frank Gunn / The Canadian Press

It wasn’t a “turning point” or a “defining moment” (these exist mostly in journalists’ imaginations), but if there was an instant when Justin Trudeau – I don’t want to say won this, because there are still several days to go, the polls could be wrong etc., etc. – but if there was a moment when he avoided completely blowing himself up before he’d begun, it came during the first televised debate, in the campaign’s first week.

You remember? That was the debate where, in the immortal words of the Conservatives’ Kory Teneycke – as he attempted the difficult manoeuvre of raising expectations of how much Trudeau would have to exceed expectations in order to exceed expectations of how much he’d exceed expectations – the bar had been set so low for Trudeau he’d be hailed as a success if he “comes on stage with his pants on.”

And for much of the debate he was, well, fully clothed: repeating the same rote talking points, talking over people, in the style that would become familiar through four subsequent debates. But eventually the subject turned to Quebec – Trudeau had used a question about democracy to work in a dig at the NDP’s Tom Mulcair for his opposition to the Clarity Act, and its requirement for a “clear majority” in any referendum on separation – and at that point Mulcair, who had been oddly low key until then, decided to pounce.

“Mr. Trudeau has an obligation, if he wants to talk about this subject, to come clean with Canadians,” he said. “What’s his number? What is your number, Mr. Trudeau?” It’s a tricky question. In fact, it’s an insane question. There’s no actual obligation on any federal leader to say what “his number” is. It may be best, in fact, not to say – to keep your options open, to avoid giving strategic voters a target to shoot at, and so on. Maybe there’s no number that would be sufficient. Or maybe it would depend on the circumstances. But try saying all that, or any of it, on such a volatile question, in the middle of a debate. Which is why Mulcair asked.

Nevertheless Trudeau began. “First of all, Mr. Mulcair, I don’t -” Mulcair – who, remember, had once said he would “wipe the floor” with Trudeau in debate, and on this very question – was having none of it. “You’re not answering,” he immediately interjected. Trudeau plowed on. “I don’t question your patriotism.” An old debate standby, along with “I’ve got no lessons to learn from you on …” and “but I’d like to ask you a question,” to be opened only in case of emergency.

“What’s the number, Justin?” Justin, note. The matador was readying his sword. There was real potential for this to be The Clip, the moment when Trudeau fell to pieces under the relentless questioning of the nation’s Prosecutor in Chief.

Trudeau was still talking, but he wasn’t saying very much (“… why is your policy so reckless?”). Perhaps he sensed he was in trouble. Perhaps he could see Mulcair getting ready to ask “what’s your number,” again, maybe in French this time. At any rate, his eyes suddenly flashed. “You want a number, Mr. Mulcair?” Mulcair was enjoying this. “Yeah,” he said, almost amused, waving his hands dismissively. “Give us a number.”

“I’ll give you a number,” Trudeau said. “Nine. My number is nine.”

What? In the video, you can see Mulcair’s eyes flicker, just before the camera cuts back to Trudeau. “Nine Supreme Court justices said one vote is not enough to break up this country, and yet that is Mr. Mulcair’s position. He wants to be prime minister of this country, and he’s choosing to side with the separatist movement in Quebec and not with the Supreme Court of Canada.”

Now, I don’t want to pretend this answer makes any more sense than the question. The Supreme Court did not write the Clarity Act. Indeed, the Act goes quite a bit further than the Court did. The Court said only that Ottawa would be obliged to negotiate if there was a clear majority – though it could always choose to do so, whatever the size of the vote. It was the Act that forbade Ottawa from negotiating unless there was. And Mulcair had pledged to repeal it.

But so what? The point is: it was an answer. What Trudeau needed in that moment was not a logical answer to an insane question. He just needed an answer. I don’t know whether he had been given this line beforehand, or whether he came up with it on the spot. (I can find no record of him saying it publicly before then – or since – and I doubt Mulcair would have asked if he had.) It doesn’t really matter. It was the right thing at the right moment. The Supreme Court! Nine! I’ll give you a number!

That was 10 weeks ago.

There have been any number of twists and turns in the campaign since then: the decision to go into deficit, on the same day Mulcair announced he would keep the budget in balance; the Syrian refugee crisis, and the associated surge in support for the Tories; the sudden explosion over the niqab, and its equally sudden implosion (support for both the Tories and the Bloc has been fading ever since).

Campaigns are made up of hundreds of “turning points,” most of which we never get to see. But they’re also path-dependent. A good moment doesn’t guarantee success, or a bad moment failure, but it conditions everything that follows. And so although it’s true that Liberal support began to rise not long after that first debate, I don’t want to say it was because of it: how many people watched, after all?

But if things had not turned out the way they did that night – if he had been unable to come up with an answer, at the very outset of the campaign – if he, a Trudeau, could be schooled by his older, smarter opponent on a critical question of national unity – well, what was that about showing up with his pants on?

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